Gordon Brown: The next global cause: free education for all

Today 110 million of the world's children will not go to school. The vast majority are girls. Half of Africa's children will never finish primary schooling.

Offering primary education to every child is the most cost effective investment the world could ever make. For $10bn [£5.75bn] a year, every child in every continent could have teachers, books and classrooms. For less than 2p each per day, we could provide schooling for every child in the poorest countries, or give girls the same chances as boys in 50 countries where girls lose out dramatically.

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The past year saw a massive campaign to double African aid, write off debt and ensure treatment for all Aids sufferers by 2010. This year should usher in a new resolution that, by delivering our Gleneagles promises on aid, we achieve the Millennium Development Goals for education and health care. Our mission should be universal free education for every child, universal health care for every family, and I will suggest to the G8 finance ministers in Moscow next month that this mission to deliver should reach its climax in 2007.

I am astonished at the number of school-to-school link-ups already existing between Britain and Africa. We should now encourage more schools, then colleges and universities, to join the crusade for education. And the benefits are not just for the children, but for everyone.

Delivering on education is not just about the empowerment of individuals to realise their potential, putting opportunity directly into their hands. It is also the best anti-poverty strategy, and - with trade justice - the best contribution we can make to growth and economic development. The benefits are in job chances and prosperity - for every additional year of a child's education, estimated average earnings increase by 11 per cent; and in health - for each additional year of a mother's education, childhood mortality is reduced by 8 per cent.

I visited Mozambique last February and found that mothers completing five grades of schooling are twice as likely to vaccinate their children. Zambian mothers with a secondary education are 30 per cent more likely to take their children to a clinic for treatment.

And education is also vital in preventing the further spread of Aids. Women with schooling are thought to be three times better able to protect themselves against Aids than those with no education. Even in the worst affected communities, primary age children are largely uninfected and represent a window of hope into the future: if these children could grow up free of HIV it would, over a generation, change the face of the epidemic.

But the demand must be for education free of charge. User fees can take as much as a quarter of a poor family's annual income in sub-Saharan Africa. Their very existence discourages parents and is one of the biggest barriers to the expansion of schooling in the poorest countries.

And free education should not be at the expense of good quality education. As making education free increases demand, investment in teachers, materials, training and reduced class sizes is needed to increase supply.

You feel most passionately about the sheer waste of potential when you meet children excluded from chances we take for granted. In Britain, pupils think nothing of enjoying free education. In Africa, it is a right still being fought for.

One of my most vivid memories from my visit to Kenya last January was hearing children in Kibera outside Nairobi chanting the slogan "Free Education". I recall teenagers in rural Tanzania pleading with me, demanding to know why they were excluded from the chance to study and stay on at school.

I will never forget the scores of mothers working in sugar fields in Mozambique, waving their £5 weekly pay cheques - and demanding to know how they could ever afford, no matter how hard they worked, to pay for their children's education.

And I met a 12-year-old girl in a hut in a Tanzanian village. Her brother was suffering from Aids and she told me that - to help him - her ambition was to be a doctor. But I knew there and then that this impoverished girl, no matter how determined she was, could never afford secondary school, far less pay for a medical education. Without the action we propose, her potential - and that of millions - will remain forever unrealised and unfulfilled.

Yet the demand for education and the faith in it is impressive. When Kenya made education free, one million children turned up from nowhere to enrol for schooling. One million who could not afford education one day started to grow, develop and flourish at school the next day. When Uganda made education free, numbers increased from three million to over five million and the gender gap was all but eliminated. When Malawi made education free, enrolments rose by 50 per cent to three million.

But even today, the World Bank estimates 77 out of 94 poor countries still charge some type of fees for primary education. Under the World Bank's fast- track initiative, countries like ours - with Hilary Benn's leadership - are providing increased financial aid in return for poor countries committing to prioritise education. Under this initiative, universal free primary education could be provided to 67 million children in up to 60 countries currently denied it - almost two thirds of the global total excluded.

But we know the poorest countries cannot provide schooling and abolish fees without long- term predictable funding. A year or two's aid is not enough to plan for a generation of new schools and teachers. Britain's proposal for an international finance facility would break free from the halting and intermittent aid of the past, would frontload finance and guarantee it for the long term. The pilot facility for immunisation will start to show what can be done, frontloading $4bn to save five million lives by 2015.

During the coming year, we should start a new facility to do the same for long-term provision of schooling, not only enabling children to break from the vicious cycle of illiteracy, unemployment and poverty but empowering poor countries to become educated and skilled as a means to growth. So in 2006 and 2007, "Education for All" should not just be a slogan. It should become a global cause around which the world can unite that affirms our dignity as human beings - that no matter their birth or background, every child in every part of the world should have the chance to realise their potential, to bridge the gap between what they are and what they have it in themselves to become, and so to enrich the world.

Let us become the first generation in history that develops not just the potential of some but all our children. We know what quality education can achieve. We know that delivering free education is a test of our resolve at Gleneagles to double aid. We can afford it. And we cannot afford not to do it.

The writer is the Chancellor of the Exchequer